Disposable Asset Page 12

  The cuffs fell open, and then her hands were free. She weighed the manacles in one palm, considering.

  She faced the window again. Using the spur of the cuff, she tapped the dirty glass. Clunk.

  She tried again. Crack, and a hairline fissure appeared at the point of contact.

  She tried again. This time she got the angle perfectly, and heat-treated carbon steel sliced neatly through glass: kresssh.

  Freezing air whistled into the cell. Gingerly, she reached between rusted bars to pluck out the largest shard of glass on the sill, a wickedly curved slice almost eight centimeters long. Setting the shard and cuffs carefully aside, she recovered another fragment, two centimeters shorter but still adequate for her purposes. The rest of the big pieces had tumbled outside, out of reach.

  Using two fingers, she greedily scooped up snow from the sill and shoveled it into her mouth. Don’t swallow. Tiny pieces of glass. Let it melt …

  Water. Ambrosia. Paradise.

  She spat out a few fragments, aware of a brief tingling pain on her tongue, and went back for more snow. Cold, wet, refreshing, utterly delicious. Even the dirt seemed delicious: all part of Mother Earth’s glorious, inimitable plan.

  When she had consumed all the snow within reach, she sank back to the floor. Her last protection from the elements was now gone. She couldn’t even zip up the parka. The temperature in the cell was dropping rapidly. But at least she had a chance.

  She set the smaller shard within easy reach, closing the larger shard in her right hand, taking care to break neither skin nor glass.

  And waited.

  EIGHT

  SEREBRYANY BOR

  Ravensdale ran a hand gummily over his face, then put his legs over the side of the bed.

  Still dark outside; not even a thin membrane of light glowed above the beach. His internal clock was hopelessly misaligned. The mansion slumbered around him. He felt a sense of dislocation: this might have been another dream, nestled within the night’s uneasy complement like a matryoshka doll.

  He visited the kitchen alone, moving past flat tops holding still as ice sculptures, and brewed a pot of coffee. After downing two cups, he carried a third back to his room. Sitting on the foot of the bed, holding the cup in both hands, he gazed blankly into the middle distance.

  In his mind’s eye he saw a cocktail party, more than four years gone, at Spaso House. The official residence of the US ambassador in Moscow had hosted its share of lavish soirées – most infamously the Spring Festival of 1935, immortalized by Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita – but this one had been tame, a standard week-night placeholder, less about diplomacy than about free food.

  Ravensdale had stopped by with Jack Carlson. Fishing for recruits from their opposite number was part of the job, and word had come down that the FSB was dispatching one of its loveliest to the event for the same purpose. Upon entering the palatial Chandelier Room they found the young lady in question immediately, a striking beauty hovering near the buffet, décolletage on artful display. The chargé d’affaires told Ravensdale that her name was Sofiya Kirov, that she was a translator for a famed dramatist who was attending the party in search of material for a play. But the dramatist was locked in conversation with a diplomat, leaving Sofiya conveniently on her own, the better to find and recruit unsuspecting American targets, if they could not recruit her first.

  Stationing himself behind a neoclassical column, Ravensdale took her measure more fully. Long black hair, high Tatar cheekbones, sable crêpe de chine, stunning emerald eyes. I’d better watch myself, he thought, eyes like that. She was in her early or mid-thirties. She looked around herself timidly, fingering the neckline of her dress, exuding anxiety – a calculation, if not an outright pretense. Showing her soft white underbelly, she invited approach.

  He approached. ‘Alë, garázh,’ he said ironically: Hey, citizen.

  Fast forward to a rainy night fourteen months later. The exposure of a crucial Force Multiplication officer in Sicily had sent shock waves rippling through agents in the field. The possibility that Ravensdale might be withdrawn seemed very real. All that rainy night, whispering beneath the covers, he and Sofiya confessed star-crossed love like two teenagers. O teach me how I should forget to think! In Gorky Park, the next day, they put on the usual show for the usual telephoto lenses brandished by the usual surveillance teams on both sides. That night they rendezvoused at Sheremetyevo-2. Flew commercial, using cash, to JFK. Standing outside a Starbucks on the main concourse, surrounded by the zombies of three a.m., Ravensdale brushed aside a flyaway strand of her black hair (tinged, he noticed for the first time, with gray near the root) and kissed her neck. She responded with a small smile, edged with apprehension.

  Ten months later he tried to follow the stretcher into the OR, but a young male nurse intercepted him, declaring that no family was allowed in the operating theater. So Ravensdale sat alone, in a waiting room of unyielding plastic, as the doctors worked to deliver the baby from his wife. Eventually, like expectant fathers stretching back into time immemorial, he paced. Outside was another rainy evening, a moody drizzle picking up and then fading away. At last the OR doors flapped open again. Stepping into the waiting room, peeling off skintight gloves, an aristocratic-looking doctor found his eyes. ‘Ah; the doting husband. Your wife is resting comfortably. Your son is on his way to the nursery. If you’d like to meet him, now’s the time …’

  He blinked, came back to the present.

  Setting aside the coffee, he reached into the night-table and took out Fletcher’s parcel.

  Not that I don’t trust you. But the girl will not be released until your end of the bargain has been honored.

  He turned the plain brown package over in his hands. The contents killed without discrimination. There might be innocent bystanders inside the restaurant. He had come here to put paid to past sins. What sense did it make to double down?

  Something, perhaps, about the lesser evil, the greater good. Hm?

  I prefer the scalpel to the sledgehammer. But I use whichever proves necessary.

  He closed his eyes. Behind the lids he found Fletcher: Being a good father means leaving your son a world worth inheriting. And Dad: A man does his best. His best is all he can do. And Marchenko: You bring me the assassin. I bring you your wife. And Sofiya: sable crêpe de chine, dancing green eyes. A small smile, edged with apprehension.

  SAINT PETERSBURG

  A cinderblock moved, rasping.

  In a flash she was awake, alert, back to the wall beside the meal slot, clutching the shard of glass. Disable your target by slashing a muscle and he’ll be unable to defend himself. Then you’ll be looking for your fatal attack, your vein or vital organ …

  The cinderblock extruded a few more centimeters. Cassie held her breath. With a subterranean grating sound, four cinderblocks around the meal slot were vanishing. A shadowed figure was crab-walking through the low door and into the cell, pistol in hand.

  Gliding up behind, she slashed a hamstring.

  With a strangled cry, the man folded. Springing forward, she cupped his chin with her left palm, lifted it clear, and slit his throat.

  Convulsing dreadfully, gushing blood, the man died. Another man behind him was charging forward, but his boot failed to find purchase against gory concrete. He slipped, and she was on him. The glass bit into the right side of his throat, severing the digastric, and he screamed a high womanly scream. The next slash opened his jugular.

  With one foot, Cassie rolled him over. The uniform was the green-and-black camouflage of the OMON. The face was so ordinary as to defy description. For a brief moment, she looked into it.

  One more for which Quinn would answer.

  Then she moved again.

  From the cell’s floor she recovered a Stechkin machine pistol, with full twenty-round magazine. Switching to single-fire mode, she listened at the open door and then ducked out into a night filled with starlight.

  She found herself in a yard spotted with free-s
tanding cells, some half-buried, with only barred windows and cinderblock roofs showing above ground. The skyline was dominated by a tremendous glittering Russian-Byzantine church, with a huge gold-plated dome blotting out a background of stars. This, she realized after a second, was Saint Isaac’s Cathedral. So she had ended up in Saint Petersburg, after all.

  Before her was a large and blocky concrete building with an institutional air, the command center of the prison to which the isolated cells belonged. An attached structure jutted off to the right. Farther out, an oasis of electric light illuminated a parking lot and fleet of dark-blue tri-axle trucks. On the other side of the parking lot, she could just make out a high fence.

  Turning, she looked past the cell in which she had been held, past another high fence, to a steep drop-off and icy river. Across the ice spread more of Saint Petersburg: obelisks and apartment buildings and broad squares and tall spires, and a population of five million into which she could vanish, if she could only reach them. Searchlights from both shores crawled irregularly across the river’s frozen surface.

  She looked wistfully back toward the trucks in the parking lot. Tempting. But in that direction would surely be dogs, and spike strips, and machine-gunners. The river it was.

  Keeping to darkness, she approached the fence and the steep bank beyond. Four meters high, topped by razor wire, the barrier would have presented a challenge had she been in peak form, which she definitely was not. Still, adrenalin had given her a charge, clearing her head. If she moved quickly, she would have a chance.

  Looping the Stechkin around one shoulder, taking two handfuls of cold wire fencing, she hauled herself up. Biceps and calves trembling, she repeated the motion. Then she had to pause, gathering herself for another upward push; suspended there, quivering, she felt a wave of faintness crash across her brow. If she passed out, she would wake up back in the cell … if she woke up at all. And never again would they be so careless as to give her any chance at escape …

  Through sheer force of will, she heaved herself to the top of the fence and then over, cutting her left hand and nicking her right cheek on concertina wire in the process, but what were another few cuts and scrapes? Landing heavily, she took one knee and concentrated on remaining conscious. The tide of darkness lapped in … and in … and then pulled back out. After a woozy moment, she moved again.

  Frigid sand slathered weirdly underfoot. The bank was sheer; she slid down heedlessly, letting gravity take her. Reaching the river, she tested the surface with one booted foot. By the shore, at least, the ice seemed perfectly solid.

  Tentatively she extended her right foot without applying her full weight. After a moment she brought her other foot forward, ready to spring backward at the first creak. The ice held. She moved her right foot forward again and then took a few quick, shuffling steps across a thin layer of wind-blown snow. When she had gained two meters from the shore, she paused. From here she might still be able to leap to safety if the ice cracked. A few steps farther, though, would put her into the kill zone.

  But the ice still held. So she took another step, and then – gingerly – another.

  Freezing wind came keening down the river. Her teeth rattled like dice in a cup. But the ice still felt solid, and the closest searchlight had wheeled far off to the left. Keeping her eyes fixed on the far shore, she hazarded another few steps. Now she found herself reluctant to lift her feet off the ice at all; the following few steps were hobbles. The ice beneath her groaned complainingly. She might still reverse course … but she was already one-quarter of the way across.

  Shuffling steadily forward, she soon found a rhythm. Keeping her weight evenly distributed meant remaining in constant motion. Like a shark, she thought. Stop moving and you die. Story of my life.

  The muscles of her right calf cramped. Gritting her teeth, she came to an involuntary halt. Was it just imagination, or did the ice sag beneath her? If it was still groaning, she couldn’t hear; the wind had grown deafening, a quivering glissando working up and down the river. Taking one knee again, she kneaded the knotted muscle of her calf. When her numb fingers proved ineffective, she used the cold barrel of the Stechkin. Eventually, the oxygen-starved tissue loosened. She held position for a moment, resting.

  A new halogen searchlight blazed to life on the shore behind her.

  Regaining her feet, she kept moving. The wind helled against her like an invisible buffer. The searchlight oscillated, coming within a yard of her, sending her heart into her throat, before reversing, sweeping off toward Saint Isaac’s.

  She shuffled resolutely on. Halfway across now; nearing three-quarters. The light was coming her way again. She debated turning and shooting it out, which might buy a moment. But doing so would reveal her position. And there would be plenty of other lights ready to replace it. Better to concentrate on hustling to the far bank. She could see it clearly now beneath the stark yellow quarter-moon: a pedestrian walkway leading to a park, bordering a residential block of domed churches and squat cottages.

  An instant later came the sound of helicopter blades thrashing the night sky. Goddamn it.

  She didn’t pause to look up. She skate/shuffled across the ice, finding the rhythm again, never coming to a full stop. Just like cross-country skiing, she thought. A pleasant day in the countryside with friends. A roaring fire and hot cocoa waiting back at the lodge. Little marshmallows. Turtleneck sweaters …

  Then she was nearing the walkway, the small park. The helicopter and searchlight had still not found her. The ice would be thicker here, nearer the shore; she began to run, knees pumping, tasting already the sensation of solid earth back beneath her feet—

  —and watching in horrified disbelief as the ice buckled beneath her.

  In the next instant, she was surrounded by churning water.

  Even as every nerve screamed agony, she tried to pull herself back in the direction she judged to be up. But a jungle of living bubbles percolated around her. The light was all black and gray. Something thudded perplexingly inside her ears: her heartbeat, the helicopter blades, the drumbeat of narcosis.

  Her kicks were dangerously close to thrashes, roiling the water to threads. She saw a delicate rill of blood, feathery in the water. Through a distorted cataract, she saw the hole through which she’d fallen. Driving for it, she miscalculated, missed by half a yard, ended up hammering impotently at solid ice.

  A diffuse wash of light, as the helicopter passed overhead.

  Turning, she swam back into blackness. Her body cried foul. Her side stitched. Her lungs would burst – yet she forbade herself to try again for the hole, despite the terrible pressure, until the chopper had passed.

  The damned thing was hovering. Searching. She thrashed aimlessly, holding herself down. Darkness. Black waves rising. The cold was exquisite. The cold was boiling hot. The need to breathe would not be denied. She drove up with a pistoning kick, found the hole – not yet for Christ’s sake – and despite her best intentions clambered out of glacial water, on to ice.

  The helicopter had moved away, searchlight brushing farther down the river.

  She drew a raking breath. Stumbling up, she turned in a circle, lost. Then she realized she need take only a few steps to achieve the pedestrian walkway. Upon doing so, she vomited a thin gray gruel across frozen gravel.

  The Stechkin was gone. Her boots were gone. Waterlogged, the parka and blue jeans were doing more harm than good. Her teeth rattled fiercely. Yet she was grateful for the chattering, which indicated a beating heart. Good old body, always looking out for her. Why didn’t she treat it better?

  She staggered across icy ground. Her toes, clad now only in wet socks, clenched painfully. If she didn’t lose a few, she would count herself lucky. But somehow she had made it across. That was what mattered. She had made it across.

  Behind her, the helicopter’s searchlight pinwheeled restlessly.

  She stumbled across the gravel walkway, into the park. The only human beings in sight were unfortunate bomzh
i, shivering beneath ragged blankets. The sudden stillness was pristine, dreamlike.

  She crossed the park. On the other side, thin traffic flowed along a boulevard. She spied a blue-and-white Zhiguli prowler. Ducking back, she crouched. The cruiser passed, shining a light from the opposite window.

  Her feet hurt; her ribs hurt; her chest hurt; her hand and cheek and nose hurt; her heart and lungs and brain hurt. But she lifted her chin, stepped from the park, and kept moving.

  The old sleep poorly.

  Rather than lie awake in bed, Mariya Zaslavsky cooked. She cooked ravioli called pelmini, and perochki, fried dough filled with meat, and sugar-covered pishki, and blini with apples and raisins. She brewed tea from loose zavarka leaves, and chain-smoked one Djarum Black clove cigarette after another. Had Ivan still been alive, he would have reprimanded her – for the smoking, the needless cooking (most of the food would go to waste; although Mariya still had a good appetite, there were limits), the giving up so easily on a good night’s sleep. But of course Ivan was not around, and had not been for years, and so she cooked, and smoked, without fear of rebuke.

  Once all her pots were bubbling, she carried a bottle and tumbler into the parlor, where stacks of handwoven carpets reached almost to the ceiling. Taking down her flat needle and harp-shaped loom, she settled into a chair upholstered with silk damask. Working by the glow of a single dim lamp, she added a row to the kilim on which she’d been working for the past week. Then she paused, to refill the tumbler and stroke at two white whiskers on the tip of her chin.

  For twenty minutes, she wove and drank. Then she found herself gazing off philosophically into space, picturing Ivan in his youth, handsome and broad-shouldered and trim, wearing crisp Red Army fatigues. He flashed a sly, knowing smile. Mariya raised her tumbler in acknowledgement, although she knew she was only toasting a ghost.